Coober Pedy

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Completed our journey to the magnificently named Coober Pedy. When this name first came up I was sure that it sounded familiar but couldn’t figure out why until C reminded me that it figured prominently in the film Priscilla Queen Of The Desert. Remembering the movie character of the town as a tough talking no nonsense mining type of place I immediately adopted a deep baritone speaking voice and refused to do any bag carrying. I needn’t have worried because there was no evidence that I would be attacked for simply looking at someone the wrong way, though the number of unkempt aboriginals hanging around on the streets did give some small though as it turned out unfounded cause for concern. We tried to book ourselves onto the mail run. No kidding, for AU$145 we could have spent 12 hours riding with the mailman as he did his outback rounds. For that sort of money though we would have needed legal rights to open the mail we were accompanying and auction anything of value found therein, material or intellectual, and that was never going to happen. We settled instead for a 4 hour tour of the town and outback at a far more affordable price. Guided by a genuine opal miner resident of the town, who resembled in appearance and manner John Lock of the TV series Lost, we…

• Took in an underground Serbian church scoured out of the rock;
  
• Toured an underground house, similarly constructed, which by the way had more floor space than the house we left back home;
  
• Visited a cemetery where thankfully the underground bits were not accessible and where a local eccentric’s tombstone comprised a beer cask and the invitation to ‘have a drink on me’ (which we subsequently did);
  
• Went ‘noodling’ for opals, which basically meant sifting through the spoil heap of a long abandoned mine and collecting for ourselves the opals that weren’t worth keeping when they were blown out of the mine;
  
• Drove the Breakaways, a geological feature that made me think that this is how Monument Valley in Arizona must have looked a few million years ago, and which was the location of the broken down bus scene in Priscilla.
  

The return journey took us across landscapes that I cannot adequately describe, but if you want to get an idea go to www.nasa.com and check out their Mars lander pics.

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Photos

Priscilla
Around here they filmed the broken down bus scenes for Priscilla...